It is a great way to spend 18 minutes of your time particularly if you are interested in exploring how the explosion of online video will shape the world of innovation—especially innovation in the film business.

And explosion is the right word. As Chris says:

The first few years of the web were pretty much video-free, for this reason: video files are huge: the web couldn’t handle them. But in the last 10 years, bandwidth has exploded a hundredfold. Suddenly here we are. Humanity watches 80 million hours of YouTube every day. Cisco actually estimates that, within four years, more than 90 percent of the web’s data will be video….Video is high-bandwidth for a reason. It packs a huge amount of data and our brains are uniquely wired to decode it.

Then he goes on to say:

Reading and writing are actually relatively recent inventions. Face-to-face communication has been fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution. That’s what’s made it into this mysterious powerful thing it is…this is the connective tissue of the human superorganism in action…500 years ago, it ran into a competitor with a lethal advantage…Print scaled. The world’s ambitious innovators and influencers now could get their ideas to spread far and wide, and the art of the spoken word withered on the vine. But now, in the blink of eye, the game has changed again. It’s not too much to say that what Gutenberg did for writing, online video can now do for face-to-face communication. So, that primal medium, which your brain is exquisitely wired for…that just went global.

So take 18 minutes to watch this TED talk. Then think about how the world of film should respond to the new reality of the entire world’s population being connected by online video. And let us know your thoughts in the comments.